Antecedents and consequences of collective psychological ownership: The validation of a conceptual model

• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Author: Ana Paula Giordano,Francesco Sguera,Ana Margarida Passos,David Patient
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2418
• Date: 01 January 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Antecedents and consequences of collective psychological

ownership: The validation of a conceptual model

Ana Paula Giordano

1,2

|David Patient

1

|Ana Margarida Passos

2

|Francesco Sguera

1

1

UCP‐Católica Lisbon School of Business and

Economics, Lisboa, Portugal

2

Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE‐IUL),

Business Research Unit (BRU‐IUL), Lisboa,

Portugal

Correspondence

Ana Paula Giordano, Católica Lisbon School of

Business and Economics, UCP, Palma de Cima,

1649‐023 Lisboa, Portugal.

Email: anagiordano@ucp.pt

Funding information

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Grant/

Award Number: PTDC/IIMGES/ 3501/2014

Summary

We investigate team member feelings of collective psychological ownership (CPO)

over teamwork products, the psychological paths that lead to it, and its impact on

team workers' evaluations of team effectiveness, turnover intentions, and intentions

to champion teamwork products. We focus on the teamwork product as an important

target of ownership feelings, building on theories of self‐extension, psychological

ownership, and team emergent states. In Study 1, we validate measures for three

ownership activating experiences (OAE) that have been proposed as paths to CPO

(control over, intimate knowledge regarding, and investment in the teamwork prod-

uct) using two samples of individual team workers (n= 210 and n= 140). In Study

2(n= 183) and Study 3 (n= 200), we use surveys and a multiwave design to show

that team workers' feelings of CPO mediate the relationship between investment in

and intimate knowledge regarding the product and team effectiveness evaluations,

team turnover intentions, and intentions to champion the work product. In Study 4

(n= 48 teams), CPO was predicted by the ownership activating experiences, at the

team level. This research additionally highlights the benefits to organizations of creat-

ing conditions for the emergence of employee feelings of shared ownership over

teamwork products.

KEYWORDS

collective psychological ownership, ownership activating experiences, scale development, team

emergent state, teamwork

1|INTRODUCTION

Business media have long espoused the importance of feelings of

ownership toward work projects (e.g., Bullock, 2014) to strengthen

employee motivation. Yet only in the last 20 years has research rigor-

ously examined employee feelings of ownership (without formal asser-

tion of legal ownership) toward organizational objects, which is termed

psychological ownership (PO; Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2001). PO

addresses the latent needs that individuals have to influence and to

identify with people, groups, and objects in their environment (Pierce,

Kostova, & Dirks, 2003). Teamwork is a fertile context in which to ful-

fill these needs because of the way it connects people with each other

and with different tangible (e.g., written report; product design) and

intangible (e.g., idea for a process improvement) products of work.

When people create something with others, they can experience the

output of their work as an extension of the group, as “ours.”A better

understanding of how collective psychological ownership (CPO)

develops in teams can provide ways for managers to enhance team

members' feelings of CPO toward important work products, thereby

helping employees maintain high effort and commitment to team

objectives (Dirks, Cummings, & Pierce, 1996).

Research on CPO has tended to focus on employee feelings of

ownership toward jobs and organizations (e.g., Brown, Pierce, &

Crossley, 2014; Tseng & Uen, 2013). However, as pointed out by

Pierce et al. (2003), the “most obvious and perhaps the most powerful

means by which an individual invests him/herself into an object is to

Received: 27 April 2018 Revised: 28 August 2019 Accepted: 11 September 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2418

32 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2020;41:32–49.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

create it”(p. 17). In uncertain environments, for instance, and in teams

experiencing frequent changes in membership, feelings of collective

ownership over work products can provide individual employees with

a sense of continuity and connection to the team and to their work.

Therefore, in the current paper, we investigate employee feelings of

shared ownership toward specific teamwork products.

Although the mechanisms for CPO to emerge as a shared state

within teams have been conceptually elaborated, how this emergence

occurs over time has not been empirically explored. We examine CPO

as a team emergent state using theories of social identity and self‐

extension. Specifically, as antecedents, we examine the three owner-

ship activating experiences (OAEs) proposed by Pierce and Jussila

(2010)—control, intimate knowledge, and investing oneself into the

work product—by developing and testing a scale for the OAEs and

testing its effects on CPO and on team worker team effectiveness

evaluations and behavioral intentions.

In Study 1, we validate the measures for each of the proposed

OAEs and test the factor structure in two different samples. In Study

2, we assess the impact of the OAEs (at T1) on feelings of CPO

(at T2). In Study 3, by using a three‐wave design, we test the mediat-

ing role of CPO between the OAEs and team workers' evaluations of

team effectiveness, team turnover intentions, and intentions to cham-

pion the work product. In Study 4, we use a referent‐shift consensus

composition model (Chan, 1998) to study CPO as a team “shared

sense”. In this final study, we investigate the effects of the OAEs on

CPO as an emergent state in a sample of 48 teams competing in a

multiwave simulation. Thus, we answer to calls for more detailed the-

ory regarding specific team emergent states (Kozlowski, Chao, Grand,

Braun, & Kuljanin, 2013; Mathieu & Luciano, 2019) and for research

integrating PO into the organizational behavior field (Dawkins, Tian,

Newman, & Martin, 2017) by investigating CPO toward the teamwork

product, relating CPO to team theories, and empirically investigating

CPO at the collective level.

2|THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND

HYPOTHESES

2.1 |Psychological ownership within individuals and

groups

Psychology, anthropology, and political philosophy authors have long

referred to the products of work as a natural source of personal own-

ership. By interacting with and reflecting on possessions, “our sense of

identity, our self‐definitions, are established, maintained, reproduced,

and transformed”(Dittmar, 1992, p. 86). James (1890) characterized

the work of our hands as something that we feel as “ours”and that

may be “as dear to us as our own bodies.”Locke (1690) stated that

the creator of a material object or an abstract thought incorporates a

connection to that object of creation into his or her identity. Pierce

et al. (2001) introduced the term PO as feelings of personal ownership

toward organizational targets (e.g., jobs, organization, projects) with-

out the formal assertion of ownership. PO is a feeling that emerges

within individuals when they recognize the target as part of their

extended selves (Belk, 1988; Pierce et al., 2001). Whereas individual

psychological ownership (IPO) refers to feelings of “mine,”CPO specif-

ically refers to feelings of “ours”and hence always has a collective

agent (i.e., This is ours [versus mine]; This belongs to the group [versus

to me]). Therefore, in addition to feelings of ownership, “a social‐

identity motive underpins the development of collective psychological

ownership”(Pierce & Jussila, 2010, p. 815).

2.2 |The emergence of CPO over teamwork

products

CPO is a “shared sense of ours”that emerges within teams as a

result of the interactions among team members in relation to the

target of ownership (Pierce & Jussila, 2010), “a single and shared

mind‐set as it pertains to a sense of ownership for some object that

is material (e.g., workspace, tools) or immaterial (e.g., ideas) in char-

acter”(Pierce & Jussila, 2010, p. 811). CPO is an example of an

emergent state, which can be defined as a property of the team that

develops over the life of the team and impacts team outcomes

(Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001). Emergent states can be cognitive

in nature (e.g., team mental models), affective (e.g., team cohesion),

motivational (e.g., team potency), or mixed; indeed, they emerge

through bottom‐up processes and are amplified by interactions

within teams and are manifested as higher level, collective phenom-

ena, such as the attitudes, values, motivations, and cognitions of

group members. Team emergent states capture the alignment (or

misalignment) of team coordination efforts and task demands that

are key to team viability (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006).

For CPO to emerge, individuals must recognize that others are also

related to the work product within a team context, where members

have a sense of interdependence and cohesion within the team

(Henry, Arrow, & Carini, 1999). In teams working toward the common

goal of creating a teamwork product, the interdependence between

members to produce this product creates a sense of “us”within the

team (Henry et al., 1999). The shared relationship that team members

have with a teamwork product can be one way in which team mem-

bers perceive the differences among themselves to be less than the

differences between them and those not on the team, such that their

self‐concept is derived, in part, from belonging to the group (Turner,

Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). This sense of “us”held by

individual team members creates a basis for the “self‐extension”of

the team to include work products within its collective identity as

“ours.”Determining the boundaries of a team and the “sharedeness”

of a specific teamwork product (Pierce & Jussila, 2010) requires atten-

tion to person–object, other person–object, and person–person inter-

actions. Thus, CPO requires the activation of a collective self, with

each team member recognizing that not only is he or she psychologi-

cally tied to the work product, but also that others are too, prompting

a referent shift from the self to the group, from “mine”to “ours”

(Pierce, Jussila, & Li, 2017). This shows the importance of not only

how members relate to one another, but also how members relate to

GIORDANO ET AL.33